JINXED

Friday, March 20, 2015

Universities are
often seen as relatively safe spaces for students from all genders to interact
more freely than they would be able to off campus. Many students get together
to imagine a more equal society, one that does not tolerate discrimination, by
organising demonstrations, awareness programmes, or social events. But recent
cases of sexual violence against women on university campuses have raised
questions regarding the safety of the university space and revealed the
pressing need for gender sensitisation through active and efficient Gender
Sensitization Committees Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH).

In recent months,
the molestation and rape of female students on the grounds of Jadavpur
University (JU) in Kolkata, English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in
Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi have led to student
protests demanding better mechanisms to appropriately address such cases at
universities. In JU, a female student reported to the university and police
that she was assaulted, dragged to the boy’s hostel and molested by a group of
male students during an annual festival organized by the Arts Faculty Students
Union and that her male companion was also beaten up (on 28 August 2014). At
EFLU, a female student was reportedly gang-raped in the Men’s Hostel after
going to the hostel to visit a friend (on 31 October 2014). And at JNU, a PhD
student reported that she was sexually assaulted by a research scholar and
blackmailed to hide the incident (12 November 2014). While these cases are not
the first incidents of sexual violence on campus, they have drawn attention to
the fact that university administrations are ill equipped to appropriately
address gender violence.

Reactions to each
of the cases differed. Jadavpur University launched an internal investigation
but authorities were slow to respond and did not take immediate action against
the perpetrators. Instead, female representatives of the university paid the
girl an unauthorized visit to question her presence near a boy’s hostel on the
night of the incident and to ask her what she was wearing and whether she was
drunk – thereby violating the Vishakha Guidelines against Sexual Harassment at
Workplace which condemns the use of external pressure on the victim or the
accused during the investigation period. The police had started an
investigation but also did not take immediate actions against the perpetrators
based on the victim’s identification. Students were enraged by the university’s
slow and inappropriate actions and called for a fast-track independent
investigative committee that would look into the incident and make all its proceedings
public. They also staged protests demanding a public statement from the Vice
Chancellor (VC) as to why a proper investigation was not taking place. When the
VC ignored the protests, students began to stage an indefinite sit-in in front
of his office. In the early hours of 17 September, police and unidentified men
in civilian dress, forcefully broke up the protests, injuring several students
and arresting over 35. Reportedly, few female police officers were present and
students, male and female, were beaten and molested by male officers and the
other men in plain clothes. This only enraged students more and they organised
further protests to demand the VC’s resignation. Eventually, West Bengal Chief
Minister Mamata Banerjee visited the JU campus on 12 January 2015 to announce
to the students that the VC would resign.

At EFLU the
university decided to form a separate taskforce, specifically for dealing with the
reported rape incident, instead of reviving the GSCASH which had been dissolved
in 2012 as university authorities reportedly did not make enough efforts to
sustain the committee. Students protested to highlight that the GSCASH has been
lying defunct for some time, without any elected student representative, as is
stipulated. The accused rapists did not expect the victim to take recourse to
the law. Instead, they thought they could “handle the situation” and “talk it
out” with the girl. The assumption that they would be able to get away with it seems
to underlie their statements; perhaps they felt more confident as the girl had
been drinking and gone to the Men’s Hostel, therefore not fitting the idea of
an ‘innocent’ victim. Notions of women’s complicity in cases where victims did
not conform to ‘norms’ of dress and behaviour, unfortunately, also prevail on
campus. For these reasons, some students fear that universities, under the
guise of a ‘taskforce’ for gender sensitization want to prevent cases from
becoming public by internally dealing with the issue, potentially letting
rapists get away with just a suspension.

Following the
incident and protests, stricter rules and curfew hours were enforced at EFLU, mostly
for female students, supposedly to protect them. The university’s way of
dealing with the problem and the imposed gender segregation enraged students.
With the support of student bodies and various committees, the students began
to protest. They demanded that a defunct GSCASH be reactivated with elected
representatives from all sections of the campus community. For the students,
gender segregation and moral policing were not the right solution to gender
violence. Indeed, by forcibly keeping men and women apart and reinforcing the
idea that men are constantly trying to rape vulnerable women, the authorities are
strengthening a culture of segregation rather than one of sensitisation.

These incidents led
to protests on campuses across the country, where students were dissatisfied,
enraged even, about the fact many universities still fall short when it comes
to basic requirements for gender sensitisation and complaints procedures. The University
Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines urgesuniversities to establish GSCASH on campuses to take
necessary action to prevent any form of violence within university premises:

The
students are entitled to protection from sexual harassment by complaining to
the Gender Sensitization Committees against Sexual Harassment. It is mandatory
for each college/university to constitute and publicize this committee as per
the Guidelines and norms laid down by the Hon’ble Supreme Court.

In response to
the brutal Delhi assault and gang rape of a medical intern in a bus in 2012,
the UGC created a task force which drafted the Saksham report to “review the measures for ensuring safety and
security of women in campuses and programmes for gender sensitization”. The
report states:

A major finding and deep concern for the Task Force
has been that the weakest aspect of our institutions of higher education is
their lack of gender sensitivity. This is evident from the mode in which the questionnaires were answered
as well as the Open Forums. This means that there is a widespread culture of
not speaking out on issues, one which affects the more socially and
institutionally vulnerable students the most.

The report
recommends that the focus should be on confidentiality and fair enquiries, not coercion,
and that gender sensitisation should be
required in all colleges and universities, for students as well as faculty, teaching,
administrative and other staff.

Universities
have urged that GSCASH be established everywhere in line with the UGC recommendations.
The GSCASH is to be an autonomous body constituting of elected representative
members from each section of the university community – students, teachers, and
non-teaching staff. The function of the committee is not just to take down
complaints of gender violence and set up enquiry probes; one of the primary
functions of the GSCASH is to bring about gender sensitisation within the
university space.

JNU was one of the first universities to implement
GSCASH in compliance with UGC directions. JNU has had a history of gender
violence on the campus and students and teachers have been seen turning to
GSCASH to take appropriate action. At JNU, students and the university
authorities, across party lines, are now proclaiming “zero tolerance” with
regards to sexual harassment. On JU campus, posters for upcoming students' elections mention the need for active GSCASH at the university. EFLU and other universities, such as Aligarh Muslim University, followed JNU and also implemented GSCASH. However, as
reactions to the recent incidents at Jadavpur University and EFLU show,
students, teachers and the university authorities do not always understand the
importance of GSCASH as opposed to merely an internal complaints committee.

What the recent cases
reveal is that sensitisation without segregation is needed more than ever. Boys
and girls must be provided greater access to spaces within the university where
they can meet and hang out as equals. This might be one of the early steps
towards building a more egalitarian campus. A central university like EFLU has
students from different parts of the country and from different backgrounds.
There is no need to create more dividing lines than there already are. The
university has the power to influence students and define the way they think
and understand the world, so why not teach them a sensitive way of interacting
with other genders?

My article on the need for Gender Sensitisation in University campuses published in Himal Southasian.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Ritoban Chakrabarti’s When She Smiled is what can be called a
romance-youth fiction, dealing with young love. Set in the idyllic settings of
Shimla the Himalayas provide the perfect backdrop to suddenly fade into when
the narrative slows down or decides to take a rest. There are nostalgic descriptions
of the sleepy Himalaya town, which for most of us is nothing but the famous
tourist destination. There are descriptions of quaint winding roads and the
long walks along them with the white wafts cloud that suddenly engulf you. It
was quite easy to imagine, given that I am familiar with the terrain and its
peculiarities, strictly in a touristy fashion.

The story starts with Roy, a Bengali, a misfit
right from the day he was born, having gotten stuck with a name like Mrityunjoy,
which only another Bengali can understand the plight of; especially when finds
oneself in the middle of a crowd of non-Bengalees completely unfamiliar with
the Bengali’s knack for bombastic long winded complicated and difficult to
pronounce and spell names. It is enough already that they are long, it is worse
when you try teaching your peers how to pronounce and in the process almost
endanger them to losing some teeth. However, Roy with the short term memory of
150 plus IQ handles his first day in a new high school with quite panache. If
nothing else, the author sure does let Roy give quite a show of saving the
situation when it came to Bengalis with difficult names having to introduce
themselves AND saving face in front of a room full of late high school kids out
to get you. He is returning to his old school, which he left for two years of
Sainik School, with dreams of eventually joining the National Defense Academy.
However, a freak accident crushed all such dreams and the readers join him on
that day when he woke up at 6 on that spring morning to rejoin his old school.

As the dedication on the first page
shows, the book is the author’s tribute to Shimla, which is evident in him
often going for trips down his memory lane. The story is this one year from
Roy’s life that proves quite educative and enlightening for him. As always the
journey to knowledge is never an easy one and Roy goes through his trials and
tribulations, heart break and loss, until he discovers the light that shows him
the right path of life.

Roy has a fairly typical middle class
family with a father who is bordering on abusive and only interested in seeing
his children excel in studies. He believes in a frugal living so as to strive
for a better future. He has a massive temper, which he often unleashes on Roy and
his older brother Siddarth through cruel beatings; one of which ended up with
Sid having to be hospitalized with a broken thigh bone. His sister Ashima was
the oldest of the three siblings and was the apple of their parents’ eye –
beautiful, talented and loving; ‘was’ because Roy loses his beloved sister in
an accident when the bus she was traveling from Delhi to Shimla overturned and
fell down a sleep cavern. Their mother is shown doing nothing much other than
the thankless job of doing everything to keep the household running smoothly. They
were not a loving couple, which is evident in the few words of the author – They never shared their personal problems
with us. All we heard were voices through the walls. But that they were
enough to disorient the child Roy is evident in his description of Ashima
holding his hands and taking him for long walks, talking to him soothing him to
overcome the trauma of seeing his mother and father fight.

The major part of the story is about Roy
falling for a pretty girl in his batch, Akansha, pursuing her, falling for her,
offering his friendship and company only with the hope of taking that one big
leap. He leaps, only to fall face flat. He loses Akansha and when he tries too
hard to get her back, he realizes that the forces of nature was against him –
that he was destined to go through this pai to learn the lesson of life, that
is, to move on.

There are certain moments in the story
where the author seems to be building up for a certain burst of action or
shock, only to leave the readers waiting and it eventually never comes. The
language is crisp but fails to offer much to a reader who might be expecting
more, especially in terms language doing justice to the physical beauty of the
place. He seems to lack the patience that is needed to capture the beauty of
nature; sometimes it does pass off as the impatience of youth when one tries to
see it coming from Roy. The author does touch on social everyday issues that
those of us growing up in the 90s are familiar with. This strikes a note of
nostalgia somewhere among the readers.

There are too many stories left untold
in this book, while telling the story of Roy alone.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

The rickety bicycle stood perched on its singular side
stand. The handlebar overloaded with stacks of newspapers; different ones,
fresh from the press, waiting to be delivered. With extreme dexterity, the man
gets off the bicycle, swiftly pulls out a newspaper from the stack and rolls it
up into a neat longish baton-like shape. He looks up at the second floor
balcony where the rolled up newspaper baton in his hand has to be delivered. A
yellow taxi stands in the background. The last few morning walkers making their
way back. The man lifts his arm, leans back and the next moment the newspaper
baton was flying on its way up to its destination. It cuts through the morning
air and lands on the desired balcony. The man’s eyes followed the missile till
it vanishes into the balcony. He hops back on his bicycle and rides off. He has
more missiles to launch and see through their mission till they land.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

She was sitting at her desk in her old room. In less
than a month, she will no more be able to call this her own in the same way as
she can now. In less than a month, she will be married off into another
household where she has to start this journey of growing relationships all over
again. The past roots will slowly fade away while the newer ones will drop
anchor. She thought the former was impossible. But time proved her wrong. In
less than a month, the custom-made single bed, just like the way she wanted,
will no more be enough. She will have to finally walk out of the safety of the
room and embark upon a journey that was unknown and made her feel giddy in the
head.

He was a good ten years or older than her. He was
the only son who has lost his mother at an early age. His father was getting
old; he needed someone to take care of the household. He did not know whether
he needed a wife, but he knew that he needed a homemaker – someone who will
nourish the family, keep the engines of the family well oiled so that
everything functioned smoothly without any hiccups.

She loved to sing; had a lovely voice. Music was
something that had been her companion all her life till then. Music had stood
by her in good stead. She reveled in the whole experience of being able to lose
oneself in the intricacies of a melody. But everything changed. Music never
left her. She left music; was forced to abandon her longest companion. Many years
later she would break down in tears when she would find her voice lost; the
muscles no more having that flexibility that allowed her to sing. She failed to
recognize her own voice when she sang.

She soon gave birth to a boy, which was quickly
followed by a girl. She had her hands full. She immersed herself in ‘her family’,
taking care of the children, the husband, the house. The rhythm of her life was
defined by them. She could not continue to be the darling daughter that she
was, the youngest of all her siblings. With each passing year the strings tying
her to the family she was born into frayed while new strings were being tied in
a new family. It drained her; weakened her. She forgot to question why could
she not be strong and have both – the ties of the past intertwined with the new
ones.

Her well oiled engine suddenly began to splutter and
cough. Her husband was diagnosed with a killer disease with the doctor giving
not much time. This time she refused to give up. This time she refused to make
a choice and decided to be both. She became the provider for the family, while
continuing to be the nurturer. She proved herself wrong. She proved those
around her wrong. Most of all, she proved him wrong. She realized that she did
not know her true self – while she made a choice between the two, deep down she
did not want to choose. She wanted to be the daughter and the wife and the
mother and the boss and...

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Sudden spurts of creativity that come back to haunt you every other day. The afternoons are most vulnerable when the world seems to fall into a limbo. The sordid tales of those behind the walls slowly ferment. The smell can be caught from a distance. Suddenly. When a quick waft of breeze carries it along. Sometimes they wreak havoc with her hair - caught in their nettled mess. Something stirs. She lifts up her head. The sun Looks unfamiliar and brazen. She had always loved the moon

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Goa – a bunch of dysfunctional characters put
together – an old love letter – unrequited love and unfulfilled desires – a
road trip. That is what you have in just under two hours of Finding Fanny, apart from the whole
range of wit, quirkiness, satire and dark humour.

Ferdie the old retired postmaster is just like his
Pocolim town – both are stuck in a time warp, until he finds his letter to the
love of his life, undelivered. He has spent a good portion of his life waiting
until this letter kindles that fire to go look for his beloved. And what better
friend would he have than Angie, the virgin widow of the village whose husband
died five minutes into their marriage, choking on their wedding cake. She lives
an otherwise happy life with her mother-in-law who is uncontested as the Lady
of the village. She becomes the muse for Pedro, the painter who comes to the
village looking for inspiration. And finally, Savio, for in a road trip you need
a car and someone who knows how to drive a car.

For the first time, a mainstream commercial film on
Goa has done full justice to the place and its ethos. There is nothing new
about the fact that Goa in itself is essentially not India – and by this I mean
the Goa that is not frequented by holidaying tourists with large families and
honeymooners. As in the beginning of the film the narrator states that it will
be a futile effort to go looking for the village which is being shown in the
story because it is so quaint that it is impossible to find. One may say this
is another way of saying that the setting, along with the story, is as much
fictitious as its characters, though the official disclaimer did state the aberration
and pointed out the truth lay in the strangest of incidents. While the road
trip gives the film its breezy feel, it is difficult to not notice the absence
of any other character, human and non human, that does not fit into the main
narrative of the film. So in a road trip all we see are cows, two processions,
a kid, a bus full of incomprehensible passengers – a very difficult proposition
in India, even if you are in Goa.

One look at the Naseeruddin Shah as Ferdie (or
Ferdinand to his friends and Fernando to his beloved) and for the entire
duration of the film I simply could not get Marquez’s Florentino Ariza from Love in the Time of Cholera out of my
mind. However, Ferdinand in this case has been drawn as a character less
dramatic in colour – probably to suit the Indian taste of the lover and his
unrequited love. Unlike Florentino, Ferdinand never manages to quite make a
proposition of his love to his beloved “Fanny” (Stephanie) and the only letter
that he writes to her gets lost in time, only to return to 46 years later. How
and why, I am not to tell; it is revealed through the course of the film at
various points in the story and I must say it is worth knowing at those very
points of narrative time. This is not the first time Naseeruddin Shah delivers
an immaculate performance; but this time he had others too sharing the screen
space and demanding as much off of the audience as Naseer does. Pankaj Kapur. We
tend to forget what a storehouse of talent he is as an actor and Finding Fanny reminds us just of that.
Dimple Kapadia with her 20-kg prosthetic posterior gives the final touché to
the ensemble that brings the entire character of the film to completion.

Arjun Kapoor and Deepika Padukone could not have
asked for a better luck of working in a film that has Dimple Kapadia,
Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor all at the same time and who never manages
to make a slip in a single shot. While Arjun Kapoor was just himself, in
Deepika there was a sense of her trying to be in the skin of this character,
whose essence lay in the very carefree attitude. I am yet to make up my mind
whether to give full credit her effort or to simply draw the conclusion that
she has been too sucked up into the whole Bollywood ethos that when it comes to
portraying a character where she has to just let go, she can’t seem to be able
to go the whole hog. That is where you feel that Hindi cinema is yet to
cultivate itself. She is otherwise extremely comfortable in playing the role,
though there are certain shots in the movie where a careful audience will notice
that she seems to be physically present in the moment and yet she is not. This
is not being said to add any amount of enigma to her or to the character that
she was playing.

If Imtiaz Ali’s Highway
whets our appetite for road movies at the beginning of this year, Finding Fanny keeps the hunger alive
just when it was dying a natural death. Breathing a fresh breath of life to the
cine-goers experience, Finding Fanny
once again reminds us that a film can be enjoyed for its journey itself rather
than a happy ending. If one is waiting for that at the end of the film, let me
warn you beforehand that you will be mightily disappointed, ‘coz this film is
definitely not about its culmination but about the entire process of characters
coming together, serving their purpose, each experiencing their individual
moments of anagnorisis to continue to live life with or without changes, as
they choose.

Monday, May 19, 2014

You say not what you feel, for what you feel may not be righted by others. The others are more important and the you must subside for the you to survive.
You want not what you desire, for it may not be desired by others. And you must desire like the others.
You crave not for this loneliness to go away, for it will not. You are apparently born with it and must live it until the loneliness abandons you for another. You must know then that that is the end.